Pick any decade from the 1940s to the present day, and few would disagree that the lot of a farmer’s wife during that time was a challenging one.
Serena Arvilla Sears traded her life as an urban career woman to embrace her husband, Jack, and the rural life that he knew.
She raised and strictly governed her family until she passed away on June 13, 2013 at age 95.
Serena was born in Chicago on Jan. 1, 1918. She lived downtown with her parents, William Hugo Marti and Serena Arabella (Bews) Marti, and her older brother, Everett.
She graduated from Austin High School in 1935 and enrolled in the nursing program at Wilbur Wright College.
Her mother passed away when she was 18, and Serena took over many of the housekeeping duties while her father worked for Hostess delivering baked goods.
The Great Depression strained the family budget, and in 1937 she left school to work for Illinois Bell, where she went on to supervise a central office of switchboard operators. With Serena and Ev’s income, the family became prosperous by Depression-era standards.
The ferry from Seattle to Vancouver travels a beautiful stretch of the Pacific coastline, and it was on the deck of that ship that Serena met her future husband, Jack Kenneth Sears (1912 – 1995).
Jack, the eldest of 10 children, had grown up on his grandparents’ farm near Columbus, Montana, where he helped his grandfather Godfred Reikofski.
Jack ran a trapline in the winters from the time he was six, and in his teens began working in the building trade.
He left high school during his senior year to help support his family and was apprenticed to his uncle, master carpenter Pete Joergensen.
Jack traveled throughout the United States during the 1930s, hopping a freight train when he needed to, finding construction work wherever it was available.
When the US entered World War II, Jack decided to contribute to the war effort by helping to build the Great Alaska Highway, where he would work as a carpenter, building mess halls and dormitories for the road crews. It was on his journey to the Alaska Highway job site that Jack boarded the Vancouver ferry.
Serena found herself on the Vancouver ferry during a rare vacation to visit her aunt Anna Fitzgerald in San Francisco. She exchanged addresses with the charming young man she met on the ferry and promptly began writing letters to him. Their initial attraction deepened in the following months as they corresponded.
With the Alaska Highway nearing completion, Jack’s letters informed Serena that he might soon leave that project and join the military. So it was not a complete surprise to Serena when he arrived on her doorstep in Chicago, saying that he was now in the Navy and wished to marry her. She accepted his proposal, and they were married in Chicago on Oct. 2, 1942, eight days after he had enlisted in the Navy.
Jack shipped out several days later. He served as a Seabee with the 62nd Naval Construction Battalion, rebuilding the naval facilities at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.
Serena gave birth to their daughter, Bonnie Kae, on Aug. 9, 1943.
After his discharge, Jack returned to Chicago and worked as a plumber at an aircraft parts factory. From there, Jack and his young family moved to Jackson Hole, Wyo., where he built several bridges across the Snake River.
They continued to travel to construction jobs throughout the rural West, typically living in primitive cabins, and Serena adjusted to living conditions quite different from those to which she was accustomed in Chicago.
While building a chimney for Ray and Clare Smith, Jack and Serena decided that they had found the right place for Jack to fulfill his desire to own a farm.
The Sears family moved to the Kirk area in September 1944, where they farmed the Royce Darling place.
They moved to the Sam Weaver place near Joes in 1945. They raised wheat, milo, dryland corn, hogs, and ran a small dairy operation. Jack continued to use his construction expertise, adding onto the original 1886 Weaver house, building several farm buildings, and doing various projects for others around the community. He milked twice a day and farmed three quarters with a model M Farmall.
On Feb. 16, 1947, Serena gave birth to twin sons, Grant and Stephen.
Jack appreciated good food, and living on County Road G between Joes and Kirk there was only one place to get most meals. Fortunately, Serena was an excellent cook.
Her kids and grandkids have different favorite dishes, but agree that her stuffed pork chops and lemon meringue pie (even after she switched from lard to shortening for crusts) were particularly delicious.
She kept her cookie tins well stocked, and everyone stopped by the house to grab a handful on the way to the field. When asked to share her knowledge of cooking, she would pull out a well-worn copy of a thin stapled cookbook that was given to her in 1934 on a tour of an Armour meat plant, with the air of a magician revealing her secrets.
Nobody else found the pearls of wisdom in that book (aside from one excellent rib roast recipe), so her offspring either had to figure out cooking for themselves, or marry a good cook.
Serena was particular about her housekeeping. Until the late 1970s, she did laundry with a round-tub Maytag washing machine that had a wringer instead of a spin cycle.
She would iron her sheets with light starch, and tucked and smoothed them onto the beds with great precision.
Few things are more satisfying than, at the end of a long day, slipping between the linen sheets of a bed that Serena made.
In 1955, the family moved to Denver and enrolled their children in school there. Jack worked as a stonemason along the Front Range area.
He laid stone at the Air Force Academy (where he set the eagle statue), the University of Colorado, the Arapahoe Mall in Boulder, the Mountain States Bank in Denver, and many other projects.
During this time he continued to actively farm his land, making many trips between Denver and Joes. Serena kept a close eye on her children’s studies, and worked part time keeping books for Hertz, a local pharmacy supply wholesaler.
The Sears family was baptized in the Galilee Baptist Church in Denver on Feb. 2, 1958.
In 1965, Jack and Serena returned to their home near Joes. The same year, they installed their first center pivot sprinkler.
As Jack used more irrigation his farming increasingly focused on corn, while he continued raising wheat, hogs, and cattle. Grant and Stephen joined the farming operation full-time in 1970.
As a self-taught bookkeeper, Serena had few equals. She prided herself on her meticulous records. Long after computers made calculation errors rare, she would carefully recalculate every statement she received (and occasionally found data entry errors).
As the business grew and the years went by, Serena accumulated rows of file cabinets and many banker’s boxes full of records. Yet she could quickly find the document she wanted, whether it was the latest insurance policy for the silver Peterbilt or a canceled check from the 1940s. Every year she rose to the challenge of tax preparation.
Serena made it clear to her family that she would not tolerate any of them stepping out of line.
On rare occasions, her Chicago roots came to the surface and she would emphasize the point she was making by adding “see?” to the end of the sentence, like a character in an old gangster movie.
And whenever you’d see that certain flash of steel in her blue eyes, you felt that you’d just as soon be facing Al Capone. While none of her family wished for her strictness at that moment, it greatly influenced their lives and surely had a role in their later successes.
At the age of 90, Serena moved to Hillcrest Care Center in Wray. By that time, she had outlived the rest of her friends and relatives in her generation.
The Christmas card list that for 60 years required multiple boxes of cards chronicling the year’s stories in Serena’s tidy cursive handwriting had dwindled to a single name.
Serena is survived by her three children, six grandchildren (Jay, Matthew, Elisa, Ken, Angie, and Brodie), and nine great-grandchildren (Riley, Zak, Brandon, Lauren, Eden, Fiona, Alice, Sienna, and Sullivan).
Funeral arrangements were made by Baucke Funeral Home of Yuma. A private family service was held at the Kirk Cemetery on Tuesday, June 18, 2013, with Pastor Terry Covert officiating.
The family requests that any memorials be given to the Hillcrest Care Center.
